Lenovo Ideapad 100S – A Terrific Lightweight Laptop for Under $200

With not many options for laptops for under $200, the Lenovo Ideapad 100S is a pleasant surprise. It does not look cheap, it is lightweight, and includes Windows 10 with a touch of style. It boasts of good viewing angles and a staggeringly long 9 hours of battery life!

It is similar to laptops in the same price range but the 11.6-inch 100S does deliver good, decent performance along with a good keyboard and mediocre touchpad quality. As per early reports, the laptop can work well as a good secondary computer or child’s laptop.

The Salient Features

The Lenovo Ideapad 100S is available in red, blue, gray or white and has a classy matte finish that carries the accent color all over the system.

The Ideapad 100S comes with 32GB out of which nearly 17GB is free, while Windows 10 takes up the rest. The storage can be bolstered with an inexpensive microSD card of 64GB or utilize 1TB of cloud storage with Office 365 subscription.

Display and Audio

Ideapad 100S isn’t as colorful or sharp in its images as those on expensive laptops, but it delivers good image quality and wide viewing angles. The screen can reproduce 62 percent of sRGB color gamut, delivering decent quality images. The bottom-facing speakers provided sound that was easily loud enough to fill a complete living room. The audio fidelity and volume is much better when the laptop is placed on a flat surface

Keyboard and Touchpad

The scallop-shaped keys of the laptop are fairly large, and good to target. Also it offers better typing experience than Acer Cloudbook One 11, which has narrower keys. Although flex could have been avoided, it is not a major deterrent.

The touchpad offers highly accurate navigation but there is lack of support for pinch-to-zoom and two-finger scrolling along with other gestures. There are two discrete buttons for left and right clicking to avoid the jumpiness we witness on many click pads.

Other Features

The Ideapad 100S is cool at most touch points even after major processing and streaming of video.

It hosts a number of useful ports in its small frame – power port, HDMI-out, an audio jack and even a small microSD card reader, to expand on the hard drive.

There are USB 2.0 ports but no USB 3.0 is a problem.

Webcam pics are serviceable in good light.

It is powered by a low-cost, Intel Atom Z3735F CPU and includes 2GB of RAM that guarantees good performance. It scored a solid 2,195 on Geekbench 3.

The Ideapad 100S lasted a fantastic 9 hours and 48 minutes with continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi, much better compared to many other laptops.

There is a preloaded Office install app with Microsoft account sign in. The subscription lets you install and use the latest MS Office versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the like for a year along with 1 TB of cloud storage. The laptop consists of basic Windows 10 apps, a One Key recovery, an emergency restore program along with a Manage Account app. One can even download Lenovo apps such as Reachit for managing cloud storage accounts, and Shareit, for sharing information with other PCs.

The Verdict and Conclusion

The Lenovo Ideapad 100S offers great value, fantastically long battery life, attractive design, solid performance and Office 365 for free. It is a compelling choice compared to its competitors. Some laptops might have more endurance in this price range, but one can find this a good option for secondary laptop. For a Windows 10 laptop under $200, the Lenovo Ideapad 100S is a steal!

Rajiv is one of the founders of Nimblechapps, a web and android game development company based out of India. At Nimblechapps he overlooks delivery, product development and often lends a hand to the in house development team. His personal interest include Travel, Food and Motorcycling.